Friday, August 14, 2015

The above image has been floating around Facebook, often coming from Bernie Sanders supporters, as an attempt to persuade people that very little of their tax dollars go to welfare and the vast majority goes to corporate subsidies. Before I get too into my back of the napkin level analysis, I want to state that I am critical of corporate subsidies and feel they are a real and growing problem. Having said that I think it's also important to point out what looks to be deceitful propaganda and this word image certainly appears to be just that.

The amount "you pay" in taxes making $50,000 comes to $4597.98 in the above breakdown. Of course what you actually pay is not just based on how much you make but on marital status, number of dependents and a slew of deductions, but regardless, the number is close to what you'd expect your federal withholding would be if you made $50,000 a year. This does not include the amount you'd pay in social security withholding and medicare withholding which will be relevant in the calculation below.

The word image implies that the breakdown it provides is your portion of federal expenditures. If true, it would mean that 87% of all federal spending went to corporations in the form of subsidies. This of course is absolutely absurd.

I couldn't find info on how much was actually spent in corporate subsidies in 2014 but did find a 2012 CATO report that estimated it at about $100 billion a year.

So, just for the fun of it, lets see if we can do a rework of the word image using the information above. We are trying to just look at how your federal withholding is allocated which makes this a bit difficult. As social security is mostly paid from social security tax, we will eliminate that from the federal spending breakdown. The medicare/medicaid/CHIP/market subsides are harder to figure as part of it is paid by your medicare withholding and part from federal withholding. It looks like about $200 billion in federal receipts came from medicare withholding in 2014 so well eliminate that amount from the medicare/medicaid/CHIP/market subsidies category in the federal spending breakdown.

After making these adjustments, here are the final results:

If you make $50,000 per year, you pay:

$1177.08 a year for defense
$1195.47 a year for medicare/medicaid/CHIP/market subsidies
$721.88 a year for safety net programs
$459.80 a year for interest on federal debt
$859.82 a year for infrastructure, education, research, etc.
183.68 a year in corporate subsidies

Wednesday, August 12, 2015

Charles Allan Gilbert (September 3, 1873 - April 20, 1929) was an American artist and illustrator. He is most remembered for the widely published illustration above titled 'All is Vanity' (1892). The illustration employs a double image where a woman sitting at a vanity admiring herself in a mirror also appears as a human skull when viewed from a distance or when blurring the eyes by squinting.

Interestingly, Gilbert created the image in 1892 when he was 18 years old but it did not receive recognition until 1902 when he sold the original to LIFE publishing. The image became wildly popular and is the most reproduced optical illusion in history.

Tuesday, August 11, 2015

Poisoning the well is the use of a preemptive abusive or circumstantial ad hominem attack against an opponent with the purpose of discrediting or ridiculing everything they are about to say. It generally has the following form:

1. Unfavorable information (true or false) about person A is presented.

2. Therefore, (explicitly or implicitly) any claims about to be made by person A should be dismissed.

Examples:

"Don't listen to anything Steve may tell you, he's a socialist."

or

"Before you listen to my opponent, may I remind you that he has been to prison."

Practically speaking, poisoning the well is a form of ad hominem, and as such, one should follow the guidelines of analyzing an ad hominem to determine if it is being used in a fallacious manner. This essentially means questioning the relevancy of the attack on the claims presented by the person for whom the attack was directed against.